:I do not think that any apology is necessary for calling the attention of the House to the question of unemployment before the House adjourns for its holiday, because, after all, one million homes in this country without wages represent a considerable amount of privation. I do not propose to repeat anything that has been said in all the various discussions with regard to the general question of unemployment, but I venture to call the attention of the House, and incidentally, to invite the attention of His Majesty's Government, to one special part of the unemployment problem which has, unfortunately, not managed to get sufficiently over the foot-lights, if I may say so, during the recent discussions. I refer to the state of unemployment among women that prevails, and, incidentally, to what is being done with regard to unemployed juveniles, as they are called. I beg the House to believe that what I have to say is not intended in any way as an attack on the Government, or even as a criticism of the Minister of Labour. The question of unemployment among women is one on which, I am sure, there is general sympathy in all quarters of the House, and if there is anyone who does not feel that sympathy, I am absolutely sure that if the facts were brought to his notice he would feel as much sympathy as any other hon. Member. May I at the outset, express my thanks to the Minister of Labour for one little amelioration which he has made in the Regulations with regard to uncovenanted benefit, relating, of course, only partly to women, but to some extent dealing with women. I feel that we must recognise that the right hon. Gentleman has done his best to give consideration to the difficulties and troubles which the Regulations have caused, but I am afraid that the Amendments which he has been able to introduce will not go very far, and I do not think that he himself would consider that they go very far, to deal with the hard cases. I think that perhaps the House could judge of them better when the right hon. Gentleman has had time to redeem the sort of promise which he gave, that he would issue to the House, in some codified form, the whole series of these Regulations. That will come, no doubt—I hope, perhaps, during the Recess.

I am afraid we have failed to appreciate the evil of unemployment among women to the extent that we should, because it is very difficult for us to get into our minds the fact that women have become independent industrial wage-earners to the extent that they have. I do not want to trouble the House with any statistics, and will quote merely round numbers, but I suppose that in Great Britain, while there are normally something like 12,000,000 male wage-earners, there are something like 4,000,000 female wage-earners. That is to say, one quarter of all the wage-earners in the country, on whose hands and brains the industry of the country so largely depends, are women, and therefore we must not continue to think of the employment of women in industry at wages as an exceptional thing or relating only to a small proportion. These women are to a very large extent now unemployed. Again, I do not want to trouble the House with figures, but the number of unemployed women certainly exceeds 200.000. That is a very large number to be reduced to poverty, and when we take into account those the Minister of Labour has not got on his register for one reason or another, we cannot estimate the number of unemployed women who are normally fully dependent on wages at less than a quarter of a million. That is as high, practically, as the proportion among men.

The serious thing is that while unemployment among men is decreasing, rather slowly perhaps, but nevertheless decreasing, week by week, I do not think we can give, such an optimistic account with regard to unemployment among women. The figures vary from week to week, and it is not easy to make any definite estimate, but I think the Minister of Labour would agree that whatever view we take of the evil of unemployment among men. we cannot quite take the same optimistic view with regard to women. The numbers now are not at their highest point. I think in January last there must have been several tens of thousands more women unemployed. But at the same time, the number now is higher than it was during most of last year, and it does not seem possible to anticipate any immediate reduction in the total number of women unemployed.

That is not the most serious part of it. The Government has provided, partly by unemployment insurance, partly by other means, a very large sum, viewed without relation to the need, mainly for the benefit of men, and unfortunately by the very nature of the case only a tiny proportion of that sum has enured to the benefit of the women who are unemployed. If you take, for instance, merely the unemployment insurance provision, which has been of course an extremely valuable provision, I am afraid only about 130,000 women are getting any benefit at all, except for 10,000 more in respect of short time, and that means, I am afraid, that almost half the women who are unemployed are without any unemployment benefit whatsoever. I am not bringing that by way of criticism of the unemployment insurance scheme or its administration, but I think we must bear in mind that the common assumption that the unemployed are all receiving what is called vulgarly the dole first of all is not true with regard to men and is still less true with regard to unemployed women. I do not think the proportion of men without the benefit can be much more than a quarter. Both men and women have to go without unemployment benefit to some extent, but whereas probably three-quarters of the men or something like that, because there can be no precise figure, are getting the dole, I am afraid the proportion of unemployed women who are getting it does not come to more than half—whether it is more or less we cannot tell, but at any rate it is somewhere about that proportion. I think the House ought to realise that tens of thousands of these women are suffering the most severe hardship. I am afraid the common assumption that the woman is always a member of a family, and that somehow or other, with that wonderful mutual help which is so characteristic of the British wage-earning class, all the members of the family will share and share alike and so get provided for—that may be so in many cases; I believe it is so in probably a large proportion of the cases, but at present, when you have something like a tenth of all the families suffering from unemployment, it is obvious that to place the burden of an adult woman upon a family which was going short before, means that it must go still further short. But there are a very considerable proportion of these unemployed women who are not actually members of households in the sense that there are other persons in the household providing an income. A good many of them are independent women, if not living by themselves, having dependants for whom they have to provide. I have had case after case, and other Members must have had cases, in which the woman has been the breadwinner, not only for herself, but for other dependants—for an aged mother, an infirm father, younger children, ill, weak, and sometimes, of course, mentally defective, or unable to earn their own living, and those independent women, whom we class generally, I am sorry to say, among the women who we think are provided for in a household, are the most difficult of all problems in this case of unemployment, and the Regulations do not adequately meet the need of such cases.

Let us give credit—I do not say to the Government, because after all it was the act of the whole House—let us give credit to ourselves if you like for what has been done for unemployment. It is true, as the right hon. Gentleman has more than once told the House, that much more has been done for the unemployed during these years than has been done by any other country or has been done at any other period in this country, but I am not quite sure, if we measure the provision against the magnitude of the need, that we could draw such an optimistic conclusion. Let us congratulate ourselves and the right hon. Gentleman that so much has been done, but let us remember the vast amount which has not been done. After all, if you have hundreds of thousands of homes desolate, and practically destitute, we cannot congratulate ourselves, great as is the provision, that it has been adequate to the need. I want to show that that relates particularly to the case of these quarter of a million women. There have been the export credit scheme and the trade facilities scheme, and of course in so far as they have benefited trade, we must assume that the industrial women have obtained some little advantage from them. But I am afraid we could not discover even one woman who has been taken into employment through those schemes. There must be some, but they are very few. Then there are the great schemes of relief work of one sort and another which have been undertaken by the local authorities up and down the country with the assistance of the Government. By the very nature of the case these have not found employment or relief for any woman whatever. All this we have done for the men, and it is quite right that it should be done for the men, but however much we have done for the men who are unemployed, and incidentally for their wives and children, that affords no excuse for not making adequate provision for the independent women who are unemployed who have not been able, by the very nature of the case, to obtain more than an infinitesimal amount of benefit from the schemes which have been devised primarily for the men.

Then for those who are now on their beam ends, the Prime Minister informed me that the Government could take no responsibility for them, and many hundreds of thousands of artisans and labourers who have hitherto had no connection with the Poor Law have been driven, I must say, by the inadequate action of the Government, to seek poor relief for the first time. That is a very grave social calamity, the end of which we shall not soon see. But even that does not avail very much for the unemployed women, because the boards of guardians up and down the country differ very much in their action and have been very much more stringent with regard to granting outdoor relief to single women as independent unemployed wage earners than they have been with regard to men. They have, to their honour, on the whole been reasonably generous in the scale of outdoor relief granted to men, and especially to men with families; but the scale has been extremely niggardly with regard to single women, and, unfortunately, many boards of guardians, and I believe many parish councils in Scotland, have refused outdoor relief to single women, not absolutely, but to a very large extent. Then we have had provided for these women the unemployment insurance. I would like to remind the House that a woman even when she gets the benefit only gets 12s. per week, and that does not go very far in maintaining an adult woman living alone in London or in any of our large towns and having to provide for herself. She cannot very well hang about the bridges, as it is called, and pick up the odd jobs by which men do add a little to their standing income. Even if she gets 12s., under the Regulations of the Minister of Health she gets practically nothing for her dependants. The dependants who are recognised under the Regulations are normally the dependants of the married man—the wife and children. The dependants of the unmarried woman as a rule are of another kind. They are generally the aged mother, or the infirm father, or the younger brothers and sisters for whom she has to be mother, father, and breadwinner all in one. They are not recognised as dependants. Therefore, the case of the unemployed single woman with real dependants is a hard one, and I venture to think that perhaps has not been sufficiently recognised in the Regulations of the right hon. Gentleman.

We then come to the uncovenanted benefit when they have run out of the covenanted benefit. There, again, the woman is rather hardly treated. As a matter of fact, the rules which have been made limit the cases to which the uncovenanted benefit can be given, and from the nature of that case those rules apply in a more restrictive way to the unemployed woman than they do to the man in many ways. I do not want to quote too many hard cases, but I would like to quote one from my own constituency. A woman was in employment in a local factory in a Durham village, and she was thrown out of work. She exhausted her covenanted benefit for which she had paid while in employment, and she was refused the uncovenanted benefit, because the local committee said that she ought to take domestic service. She appealed against that decision and proved that she could not accept resident domestic service, because she had living with her a crippled, aged mother, whom she almost wholly supported and to whom she attended. She could not go to a distant place for resident service and leave her mother. I am glad to say that the local committee recognised the justice of the case and reversed their decision, but,. under the rules of the right hon. Gentle- man with regard to uncovenanted benefit, she was disallowed her benefit on the ground that she was not able to seek full-time employment. She had been seeking full-time employment in the village, but she was not able to go away and leave her mother to seek it elsewhere.

I am not complaining of that particular rule with regard to men, at any rate now, but rules of that sort operate with special severity in the case of single women. Very often they have an aged mother and other dependants, and they cannot break up the home; but, even if that be not the case, the single woman cannot migrate in search of a job in the same way that a man can. Nowadays, the Durham miners are being offered situations in the South of Yorkshire, and they are disqualified for benefit unless they go. The single man can go and live under any sort of circumstances, pigging in somewhere, and it is expected of him, but you cannot put that same pressure on a single woman to go and seek employment in a strange town. It is exceedingly difficult for an ordinary single woman to migrate. Consequently, she finds herself refused the uncovenanted benefit for which when in employment she has been paying at the extra rate, for which she will again have to pay as soon as she gets into employment, and for which her sisters in employment are now paying. The money is being collected in order to pay this uncovenanted benefit, but the single woman, in a vast number of cases, is being excluded from that benefit because of the rules which have been made with special reference to men and which operate with undue severity with regard to women.

There is one other thing which we have done for the unemployed, in another connection perhaps, and yet partly under the Minister for Labour. We have laid ourselves out to provide training for the unemployed. I do not know whether the House realises how much has been spent in providing training for the unemployed. I suppose we must have spent already something like £46,000,000 on training unemployed officers and men in various grades and crafts, and many of them are still being maintained in training. I am not saying anything in criticism of that amount. It has benefited somethng like 200,000 men. There has been spent on the training of unemployed women under the Vote of the right hon. Gentleman something like £100,000, and a further sum has been obtained from the Prince of Wales' Fund. Therefore, £46,000,000 has been spent on training unemployed men, very largely in allowances for their maintenance while in training, and a few hundred thousand pounds only on the training of unemployed women. That is a disproportion which I do not think is quite justified. We owe, of course, a debt of gratitude to the men and officers for their fighting in the Great War, but we owe something, I suppose, to the women who helped to make the shells. I do not pretend to measure the relative value of the service. All service ranks the same with God, and perhaps it ought to rank the same with this House, though I am afraid it does not. The service of the women like the needs of the women does not seem to have had adequate consideration in comparison with those of the men. Perhaps it is that we have not got accustomed to realising that the women are electors as well as the men.

Curiously enough, in my view the women present the easiest part of the problem to a Government that has to deal with unemployment. I want to explain that paradox. In my view, which I have expounded elsewhere, the proper way to deal with unemployment is to prevent it from occurring. You cannot prevent fluctuations of demand of one thing or another, but they need not work out in destitution and misery. When once we have failed to prevent unemployment, and have allowed it to occur, it is very much easier to deal with the women than with the men if we only had an equal appreciation of the need and an equal determination to deal with the women. Why do I say that? You cannot in a state of unemployment really aim at getting the unemployed into productive employment in the ordinary sense. From the nature of the case it cannot be done. Consequently, you have to provide something which is not economic and profit-making, and you have to provide it in a way which will not be demoralising but which, if possible, will do the unemployed good. That means practically that the only thing which you can do is to give the unemployed maintenance under training. That is why the Government have spent, properly spent, £46,000,000 in maintaining 200,000 officers and men, but they have not done that for the women. It is a very difficult thing to provide maintenance even with training for men. It is an extremely difficult thing to avoid demoralisation when you are paying men for doing nothing, even if you insist on them undergoing training. Curiously enough, it is very much more easy to do it, first of all, for juveniles, and, secondly, for women. You can always provide training for women if you choose to do it.

Something of that sort has been done, and I want, in conclusion, to refer to what has been done in order to indicate and suggest to the right hon. Gentleman what more we think ought to be done and could be done in this direction. I am quite sure that from his experience and knowledge he does not himself need convincing, but I want to ask him whether he cannot lay before his colleagues the necessary request for a sufficient sum, in the first place, not to let the existing provision come to an end prematurely as it is in danger of doing, and, secondly, to enlarge that provision in order to provide in the best possible way, at any rate, for a larger proportion of the 150,000, or let us say 100,000, women for whom there is no provision at the present time. There is, first of all, the craft class. After all, these women who are unemployed are, in the main, industrial workers. I do not know whether the House realises that among them there are something like 40,000 cotton operatives, the highest skilled practically of our female trades, who are wanted in Lancashire. For the moment the mills are running short time, but we all expect that the trade will be resumed. You cannot spare those 40,000 skilled operatives.

Then you have in the distributive trades 25,000, dressmakers and milliners 12,000 and others. In reference to the question of craft classes, I may give one instance, which specially affects London, of workers who were called to work during the War. We have a considerable number of typists and shorthand writers who are unemployed. There are 400 or 500 in London alone. They are nearly all not fully skilled. They are shorthand writers, but not expert shorthand writers, and they go out of practice more and more because they have not got situations. The Central Committee for women's training has started classes for these people in shorthand, so as to raise, them to a high skill in shorthand. That is only a small instance, but it is very significant, because I am informed that there is an unsatisfied demand, even in London, to-day for highly expert shorthand writers, and if you can raise these women from their 50 or 80 words a minute to 150 words a minute, which I always insist on myself, I am informed that you can easily get those women situations at £3 or £4 a week, whereas they cannot be placed at all now. Is it not possible to provide a sufficient subsidy to keep those classes going, with maintenance for the women while at the class to increase their skill, to insure that these women will not go down into the depths?

Then there is the pressing subject of domestic servants. There have been attempts made, in what are called the home craft centres, to train women for domestic service. They have been very successful, but unfortunately they are only on a small scale. The money is not there for anything more. The right hon. Gentleman has not been able to provide enough money to train the women who could be made into servants, because, unfortunately, we cannot do it without money. These attempts unfortunately are limited and do not cover the whole field. I want to see those home craft centres considerably increased in number. It cannot be done in a moment, but the number could be increased if the money were forthcoming. These are limited to women who will undertake to go into domestic service. I do not object to that undertaking. I am very glad if that technical education is supplied to people who are going into that occupation, but on the other hand there are a great many women who cannot pledge themselves to go into domestic service. I could quote cases. For instance, the woman who has got a mother depending on her, where there are young children who have got to be looked after or something like that, or the women who may not be physically competent to go into domestic service. Moreover there are these skilled Lancashire weavers. You cannot propose to take 40,000 Lancashire weavers away from Lancashire.

Ten years ago industry in Lancashire was limited because they could not get enough weavers. Manufacturers could not open new sheds with the expert weavers at their disposal. That time will come again. You cannot propose to compel these weavers to go into domestic service. For all those reasons, I ask the right hon. Gentleman, instead of the £46,000,000, which is spent on the men, whether he cannot get £400,000, or even £100,000, in order to keep these homecraft centres going for those who are expecting to resume their own industry. Experience shows, I am informed, that even where no pledge was asked of those women to enter domestic service, 30 per cent, of them who have had a course of training, finding that they cannot go back to their own trade, have become domestic servants. I would suggest to the right hon. Gentleman that he can provide home training for this class of women just as much as home-craft training for domestic service alone. One of the reasons why women do not enter domestic service at present is because they pass from being insured persons to not being insured persons. While that may not mean so very much in cash, yet they do feel, I am informed, that they are giving up the insurance status, and I am glad that they do feel that. I ask the right hon. Gentleman whether it would not be possible by some Regulation or another, without extending insurance to domestic service, which I admit would be impossible, he could not, as it were, regard them as seconded, so that if they do after a. spell of domestic service go back to their trade, the intervening period would not be considered as blotting out their status. I ask whether they should not be protected from having to be regarded as domestic servants, when they have done one spell of domestic service, so as not to lose their status as insured persons 1 It does not seem impossible that something could be done by which there could be a period of absence from an insured trade which could be blotted out, and I think that if this were done, you would find that there would be more domestic servants.

With regard to the subject of domestic service, apparently large numbers of people up and down the country have got it into their heads that the right hon. Gentleman is preventing them from getting domestic servants, that the Minister of Labour is standing between them and the potential cook, because he is bribing these women with doles, thus enabling them to avoid being domestic servants. I would like to protect the right hon. Gentleman from the criticism of these ladies, and to suggest to him that he ought to speak up more in his own defence in the direction of giving an explanation, because out of 130,000 women who are this week drawing unemployment benefit there are none who are really domestic servants or are fit to be domestic servants straight away. At any rate the number is so small that it could be reckoned on the fingers of one hand. There has been some illuminating experience. An infuriated lady went to an Employment Exchange and, so to speak, quite politely shook her fist in the face of the Superintendent, and accused him of preventing her from getting a domestic servant because he was paying out unemployment doles. The Superintendent, being a man of resource, politely asked the lady if she would go out and look at the women lined up to draw the dole, and see which of them she would take as a domestic servant. The lady went out and inspected the line and came back and said that she would not have any one of them in her house at any price.

That was no reflection on the moral character of these people. That could hardly be ascertained by a hasty meeting and a hasty inspection, but it is a practical judgment as to the past experience and domestic training possessed by those women. The right hon. Gentleman fails, perhaps, in not providing the money that would give them training in a comparatively short time, but he is not guilty of bribing them to leave domestic service by a dole. Of course there has been a number of special inquiries. The Minister of Labour is always very prompt and very good in answering any complaints, and going into any representations made to him, and there have been representations from various localities. For instance, there was one from the respectable neighbourhood of Putney, where ladies complained that they could not get servants because they were deprived by the dole. An investigation was made and it was found that only seven women, in all that large area, were drawing the dole at all, and those seven, for one reason or another, were impossible as domestic servants. There was a similar complaint from perhaps a more aristocratic neighbourhood of Sussex in the South. Similar inquiry was made and it was found that there were no women at all on the dole. There had been two and they had gone off. Therefore, it is not true that domestic servants are being kept away because they are in receipt of the dole. I am afraid that the stringency of the right hon. Gentleman has gone even too far in preventing potential domestic servants from drawing the dole. My complaint is that his rules have excluded tens of thousands of unemployed industrial women who could not in the very nature of the case take domestic service.

I would have liked to refer to the question of juvenile unemployment centres, but I will leave that to others. I would ask the right hon. Gentleman whether it is not possible to get a comparatively small sum of money for these women to whom I have referred. I am not asking him for £46,000,000. I should be very well content if he could get a few hundred thousand pounds to prevent these classes and the maintenance system coming to a premature end in June or July or thereabouts. They must be kept going and they ought to be enlarged. One aspect of this question, which I do not think any responsible Government can overlook, is that these are not old women. A large proportion of them, at any rate, are not too old at 40. They are often round about 30 years old, and in a large number of cases they are younger. If the Government by one door or another cuts off all means of subsistence from these women there are thousands of cases in which there can only be one result. These women will be the mothers of the coming generation, and we cannot afford to allow them to remain suffering and exposed to the worst of all temptations as they now are.

:I have taken a great interest in the subject which has been referred to by the hon. Member for Seaham (Mr. Webb), who towards the end of his speech made reference to the subject of juvenile unemployment centres. This matter has been before the House by way of question and answer during the last few days, and there are very few hon. Members who have not been approached by local authorities in regard to it, if, indeed, the local authorities have engaged in the enterprise of setting up juvenile unemployment centres under the encouragement of the authorities. I would remind hon. Members of what has happened, so far as the history of this question is concerned. When the munition factories were closing at the end of 1918 it was thought that some provision should be made for boys and girls who became unemployed and under what, I think, was a very wise and far-sighted policy, the local authorities were encouraged to set up these juvenile employment centres, and actually 100 per cent, of the cost was furnished by the National Exchequer. These juvenile employment centres were run pretty much on the same lines as they are now. All the money was found by the National Exchequer, and under that encouragement I understand that something like 200 centres were set up throughout the country.

Later on the grant of 100 per cent, was reduced to 50 per cent. This meant a heavy burden on the local authorities, and the number of centres was reduced until there are only about four left in all the country. In 1920 a few of the authorities hoped to establish these juvenile centres, even though they had to pay 50 per cent, of the cost, but in 1921 the authorities were informed that the whole amount of State assistance was to be withdrawn, and the whole grant was withdrawn. That was one of the first melancholy results which followed the policy that has been misnamed "economy." So matters continued until December, 1922, and then a new spirit manifested itself, for which I think the Minister of Labour should be thanked. A letter was sent out to the local authorities. I have a copy of a letter sent to the secretary of the local authority to which I belong in my own town, and as this letter explains the whole situation, I will ask hon. Members to allow me to read it, because it is the basis of the whole of the subsequent contract. It is dated 22nd December, 1922, and, obviously, it is a letter which was sent out to all the authorities at that time.

"Sir,

I am directed by the Minister of Labour to refer to the arrangements which, as your authority no doubt will be aware, were made in the period following upon the Armistice, for setting up juvenile unemployment centres for unemployed boys and girls, and so mitigating the effect upon them of unemployment. On account of the long-continued depression in trade, the snumber of unemployed boys and girls between the ages of 14 and 18 has been and is very large, and in these circumstances the Minister of Labour, after consultation with the President of the Board of Education and the Secretary for Scotland, thinks it most desirable that steps should be taken to revive the juvenile unemployment centres during the next few months. The enclosed Mmorandum, drawn up in consultation with the Board of Education and the Scottish Education Department, sets out the main heads of the scheme under which it is proposed that the centres should be revived."

The letter went on to say that 75 per cent, of the cost would be provided by the National Exchequer, and asked that the subject should receive immediate attention.

:When the proceedings were interrupted, I was about to state that a letter had been sent on 22nd December last to the local authorities, and that in that letter there was not merely a suggestion or invitation, but that the Treasury urged upon the local authorities their social duty to the children in their own locality. Acting upon that letter, many authorities—I am not quite sure of the number—set up schemes. Some of them were very elaborate schemes, and in many instances monetary provision was made for months ahead. I understand that throughout the country in this short time something like 70 centres have been established, and that there is an attendance of approximately 9,000. The results for such a short period have been surprisingly good. I would like to give the results as I have seen them in my own town, under the authority of which I have the privilege to be a member. In Plymouth we made an experiment, which has not been made in other parts of the country, but which may very well be recommended, not only to the Ministry of Labour, but the Ministry of Education. We came to the conclusion that we ought to confine these schools, if we could, to boys and girls between 16 and 18 years of age, and that the centres should not be open to boys and girls between 14 and 18 years of age as elsewhere. We thought that the best place for the unemployed boy or girl between 14 and 16 years was not the unemployment centre but the elementary school, and we therefore took what steps we could to get into our elementary schools all unemployed boys between 14 and 16 years of age.

We have on our books to-day no fewer than 683 boys and girls between the ages of 14 and 16, and most of them are there voluntarily. Of 333 boys who were due to leave the school on reaching 14 years last Easter, about 200 have voluntarily remained on. That is a very excellent experiment. Actually some of those who went, not having got employment, have returned. Schemes have been set up for interesting the boys and girls of the unemployment centres in sports. Prizes have been given by outside voluntary associations and by persons interested. The numbers who are in our centres today, or who have passed through the centres, are 363, 230 being boys and 133 girls. The council at Plymouth made provision running on to October of this year. As to the result, I would be glad to show any Member who is interested some of the opinions expressed by the teachers at these centres. The following are amongst the testimonies:

"A high standard of work is being maintained. Boys and girls are really very keen in their work."

"These lads have worked hard and well and have picked up most of their lost ground. There is an improvement in their general knowledge and especially in English."

"Of those who obtained work, several would not have obtained such good positions, if any at all by now, if they had not been in attendance at a Centre."

"General information lessons together with citizenship lectures have stimulated an interest in newspaper reading and in local affairs."

"An esprit de corps has been established and is being developed by the games."

They all remark on the spirit of friendliness and comradeship that has been established amongst the boys and girls. Among the many testimonies in our localities there is the testimony of a prominent townsman, who wrote on 10th May:

"The most eloquent appeal against the decision of the Government to close down the Centres for unemployed boys is the sadness with which the news has been received by the boys themselves. No one can visit the Centres without feeling grateful for the work that has been put into them, and angry at the very suggestion that an 'economy' of a few pounds is going to destroy them. Here are 140 youths who would otherwise be loafing in the streets. They are learning as they probably never learned in their younger days at school— learning English, and learning it well enough to choose fine books when they select their own prizes. Learning the elements of some industry—woodwork, metalwork. Taking up with some science— electricity, wireless. One youth, keen on this last subject, is passing an examination to enter the wireless service. He could never have done it but for the Centre. Learning what esprit de corps means, getting something of the school spirit: it is pathetic to see the gloom with which the closing of the Union Street Centre is watched by the boys who attend it."

In a letter to the "Times," Sir Arthur Yapp, of the Young Men's Christian Association, gave his testimony as to the value of the work of the Centres throughout the country. The Young Men's Christian Association is particularly interested in this movement. Apart from Sir Arthur Yapp, the Minister of Labour himself, speaking in Leeds less than a fortnight ago, spoke in terms of the highest commendation of the work. It was a definite policy urged on the local authorities and many of the most public-spirited local authorities acted on the advice. Centres have been set up and schemes established, and within a very short time excellent results have been achieved. Then upon 27th April there came the statement by the Minister of Labour announcing to the local authorities that:

"The Treasury Grant towards the Unemployment Centre Scheme will be withdrawn on 30th June, so far as Centres which are now running are concerned if they have completed three or more months by that date."

The House is entitled to ask what reason there is for this sudden change of policy. It has been suggested that the Centres are not needed in the summer time. That is a fallacious contention, for, as a matter of fact, if there is any difference, there is more unemployment amongst boys and girls in the summer than in the winter. Secondly, the work being done by these Centres in connection with games and open-air sports can be done specially well in the summer time. Is the closing down to be permanent or temporary? If it is to be permanent, what becomes of the argument that we are to dispense with the Centres only in the summer? If the closing is to be temporary, we come to the conclusion that, after all. the expense has been incurred, we are to break down the Centres and incur all the initial expense again in the course of two or three months. I do not think that the excuse of economy has been made. After all, there are limits of meanness to which no Government can go. You can hardly economise at the expense of the most unfortunate boys and girls in a locality— the unemployed, who very often come from homes where there is unemployment.

The work that is being done is being done at incredibly small expense. The buildings are there and assistance is being given by voluntary organisations. The whole of the work cannot be done by voluntary organisations, first of all, because they have not the money, and for the more material reason that they have not the authority that the Ministry of Labour has to make attendance dependent upon the payment of the dole. The defence of the Minister was given in this House on 25th April. It will be found in column 449 of the OFFICIAL REPORT of that date. His suggestion is that at the time the Centres were set up the arrangement was merely temporary. That defence is not worthy of the Minister or of the Department. Is it to be thought that there is a single intelligent local authority in the country which would have set up its scheme and incurred this expense if it had thought that it was doing it for a period of only three months?

There is in the memorandum that accompanied the letter of 22nd December a statement that the grant was to be made for a period of three months, but there was nothing in the memorandum or in the letter to suggest that it was a temporary proposal. In fact, the Minister, in February, never suggested that this was to be merely a temporary provision. He urged the local authorities to follow the example given by others. It is open for the Minister to say that the Centres are costing too much, or to say that the work has not been successful. It is not open to him to say that it was intended to continue for only three months. The Department is dealing with the local authorities as if they were children, or infants in the nursery building houses with bricks, simply to have the pleasure of sending them toppling over again. Fortunately, there was a gleam of light in the announcement of the Minister yesterday that inquiries were being made. I believe that that announcement was also made in another place yesterday.

I hope that as a result of those inquiries, and independently of them, the right hon. Gentleman will cancel his edict. It has been a fine bit of social enterprise, one of the best bits of recent years, and it has been amply justified by the results. The Minister, I know, has seen the work done, and I have heard his commendation. I hope that he will be no party to breaking down this experiment. The proposal to withdraw the grant is unfair to the local authority. It is unfair to the voluntary organisations that have interested themselves in the matter. It is unfair to the boys and girls themselves, who have a special claim upon the attention of the House; and it is unfair to the community. We may be driving these boys into an unemployable condition, and they may become useless to the State because of our own folly, whereas we may find in them material for building up the best elements of the State.

1.0 P.M.

:I want to join with the hon. Member for Seaham (Mr. Webb) and with the last speaker in urging the Minister of Labour to do something more for women, not merely to refuse to shut down these Centres for young people, but to extend them in the direction which I suggested on the last occasion when his Department was being discussed. I rose principally to call attention to two other matters. The administration of the funds' for relief work is so mixed that one is very doubtful which particular Minister one ought to attack. The Minister of Labour is responsible for the money; at least he generally defends the money expended on relief work. I gave notice to all the Ministers who, I thought, were concerned, for it is extremely difficult to know on whom to fix responsibility. Here are some facts with which the Ministers concerned ought to deal. I was surprised to hear the Minister of Health say that he had not heard of the case mentioned in a question just now put by my right hon. Friend the Member for Deptford. The Minister of Labour has heard of it. Many towns have had considerable difficulty with regard to relief work schemes, and the action of certain boards of guardians in relation thereto. There are two cases which I want to bring before the notice of the Minister of Labour, and I will mention the details of one of them. I am glad to see that the Minister of Health is also present, and I may mention that I have gone into the official records, and have compiled material which I shall take a future opportunity of placing before the Ministers concerned. The case to which I refer occurred in Lewisham. We had a deputation on the subject here the other night, and I find this is the case of a man who served in the War, and who has six children. He applied for the ordinary out-of-work pay, and received it, but everyone knows that out-of-work pay is not sufficient to-day for a man with six children, so he went to the board of guardians, and he received this communication:

"The guardians have come to an understanding with the Lewisham Borough Council whereby a number of unemployed ex-service men, not in receipt of unemployment benefit, might be afforded an opportunity of some work"—

I should say, to avoid misunderstanding, that the man's unemployment benefit had ceased and, therefore, he got the whole of his assistance afterwards from the board of guardians. Their communication continues—

"instead of receiving assistance from the rates. I am informed that the work consists of taking up and re-laying tar footways etc. and the wages will be £2 6s. per week of 47 hours, less insurance. It is proposed to give continuous employment for approximately three months, but the borough surveyor has the right of retaining or discharging any of the men. Your name has been selected from among those appearing on the books of your district. You will please report yourself next Monday morning at the Town Hall, taking your insurance card with you. This arrangement, if made, will be reported to your Labour Exchange with the necessary particulars."

This man was in receipt of the out-of-work pay only until the 27th of March. He found that the rate of pay that was being offered to him was less than the trade union rate. He belongs to the, union with which the hon. Member for Silvertown (Mr. J. Jones) and I have some connection, and he should have been paid 1s. 3d. per hour—some are paid 1s. 4d. This was the man's regular work. He was an excavator and a navvy, and it was just as bad to ask him to work for less than his union rate as it would be to ask an engineer to do skilled work at less than the trade union rate. He declined to work on that score alone, namely, that he was being asked to work at a blackleg rate of wages. He heard nothing at all from anyone. He continued to get his relief week by week, and, suddenly, on 2nd May, he was summoned to appear before the magistrates and charged with neglecting to maintain his wife and family. That is an extraordinary charge to prefer in a case of the kind. Formerly, when a man refused to work for a board of guardians, he was charged with refusing to do the task set to him. A man who refused to do such work as breaking stones or work in the casual ward or the performance of a task under the Relief Regulation Order, which allows a board of guardians to set up test work, was charged, not with neglecting to maintain his wife and family, but with refusing to do the work. The board of guardians, in this case, has reversed that procedure and I understand it has also been reversed at Sheffield and other places. I emphasise this because, in a sense, the man has been treated as a vagrant and has been sentenced to 21 days' hard labour.

We think that is an infamous proceeding. The work in this case was not test work. The Minister of Labour would never stand up at that Box and say that work under the unemployment schemes was to be considered as test work. This was borough council work—both at Sheffield and Lewisham—under a scheme for providing employment and not a test as to a man's willingness. Yet it is now being turned right round and used by the board of guardians as a test. I am addressing myself on this matter both to the Minister of Health and the Minister of Labour and I ask if the Minister of Health is going to do what some of the officials in his Department want him to do—namely, to say to the ex-service men and to all the ordinary workers of this country who are out of employment: "We are now going to stop treating you as respectable decent members of society; we are going to treat you in the old-fashioned way as absolute paupers and put you on to test work." I am sure that neither of the right hon. Gentlemen would dare to face a working class meeting in their own divisions and defend that position. It is indefensible at the present time. I ask both Ministers to consult together on this matter and to settle once and for all this question of the 75 per cent, of the trade union rate of wages. It has been settled in Poplar, in West Ham and in other places in a reasonable manner.

I admit that there are some men who are totally unfitted to do road work and heavy work of that kind, but we contend that there are enough unemployed in districts like Lewisham and Poplar who are efficient and capable and physically able to give a full day's work in return for a full day's pay on road work or any work of that kind. You have no right to penalise the efficient man who does not happen to have served an apprenticeship in the ordinary way but has served an apprenticeship in experience. You have no right to say to such a man that he should only receive 75 per cent, of the trade union rate of wages. You said to us in Poplar, "If you will not interfere with the discretion of the surveyor, and leave it to him to determine whether men are fit or not, then you may pay 100 per cent." I appeal to the two right hon. Gentlemen to issue a circular stating that where men are capable, willing, honest workmen, able to give a full return for the ordinary trade union wages, that they shall receive the ordinary trade union wages, and that reactionary boards of guardians or officials shall not be allowed to penalise unskilled labourers. This is a matter of importance to many thousands of men in the country, and I appeal to both right hon. Gentlemen not to return the answer that the present state of affairs cannot be helped, and that they cannot interfere with the boards of guardians. They can do so, and they can prevent workmen from being degraded to the level of test work and work paid for at blackleg rates.

There is just one other question to which I shall draw attention. The Minister of Labour is a great advocate of the King's Roll and I want to put this point to him. In every Government Department there are men who are in receipt of pensions from £1,000 a year down to about £400 a year filling positions which I contend should be filled by men without pensions. I do not want to be told, as the Minister of Pensions told me, that I want to drive ex-service men who are in receipt of pensions out of the employment of Government Departments. I asked a question as to the number of those so employed who receive pensions of over £250 a year and I find there is a considerable number. If you spend £40,000,000 on training young ex-officers and there are tens of thousands of them walking about out of work, then some of them should be employed instead of these highly pensioned ex-officers and ex-this, that and the other. If a man has enough to live on he has no business at this time of day to be standing in the way of the tens of thousands who are out of work—kept out of work by highly pensioned people. If the Minister of Labour will not be offended at my saying so, I consider it-cant and humbug to talk about the Government having the King's Seal in every Department and, at the same time, refusing employment to ex-service men, it is a disgrace to the House of Commons that this kind of thing is going on. There are plenty of men, ex-service trained men, to do the work of these pensioners only the pensioners are so greedy and the Government Departments are so shortsighted and so callous that they are prevented from doing so. I venture to say that the men who hold these positions do so very largely because they have friends and get shoved in. There is no competitive examination, and the right hon. Gentleman the Minister of Labour should use his influence -first in his own Department and then with the other Departments not merely to get them on the King's Roll, but to get them to carry out the principle of the King's Roll in the spirit as well as the letter.

:We have had a very interesting discussion centreing mainly around two points, one the question of relief work for women and provision for unemployed women, and the other the question of juvenile centres. But the hon. Member for Bow and Bromley (Mr. Lansbury) has raised three specific points with which I propose first to deal but very shortly because my time is limited. The first of those points with which I shall deal concerns pensioners in Government employment. I gave the hon. Member an answer on that subject to a question which he put me on 4th May, and I indicated then that the supposition which underlay his question was incorrect so far as the Ministry of Labour was concerned. The hon. Member now tells us that he has got further ammunition together and that he proposes to explode a bomb which is to blow up several individual Ministers if not the whole Government. When that attack takes place I can assure the hon. Member that it will receive the attention it deserves. At present I do not carry the matter any further, subject to this statement—that the supposition which underlay his original question as far as my Department is concerned, was clearly incorrect. The next of his points which I desire to take up, relates to the question of "relief" as against "test" work, and its effect in connection with unemployment benefit. The broad principle is perfectly simple to anyone familiar with the working of the Poor Law and of the Unemployment Insurance Act. That principle has been established by decisions of the Umpire and, broadly, it is that where an applicant is in receipt of unemployment benefit and in addition to this some payment is made to him in the form of outdoor relief from the guardians, if the guardians require something in the nature of test work, this does not affect his claim to unemployment benefit; whereas, on the other hand, if an applicant is on relief work for which a wage is paid, then clearly the applicant has to be considered as in employment and unemployment benefit ceases to be paid. Those two categories are obvious and clear but the difficulty in all these cases is with regard to the debatable area between these categories.

If the hon. Gentleman asks me to make a pronouncement, or to lay down a clear definition for deciding the cases which arise within that debatable area, and to say whether they incline more to the left or more to the right, I say at once that it is practically impossible to do so. Each case must be considered as it arises, in the light of those two broad principles, but if the hon. Gentleman can put any case before me, which he considers one of hardship in relation to that debatable area, then I, and I am sure my right hon. Friend the Minister of Health, so far as he is concerned in the matter, will give it most careful consideration.

:On a point of Order. Is the right hon. Gentleman prepared to consider the question whether the local authorities shall have the right to decide who are the men to receive the full wage?